Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is debut novels that I’m especially looking forward to. This was a hard one for me, since I do a lot of backlist reading and don’t tend to be very immersed in discussions about what’s coming up, much less the subset of those that are debuts. But there’s only one crossover with my first-half-out-2016 list from a few weeks ago, and the rest are definitely books I want to get my paws on!
The Futures: Anna Pitoniak’s debut is about a young couple who move to New York to start their lives…only to be caught up in the middle of the recession. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of books coming out about being young during the recession and I am going to eat them up because that’s my life.
The Leavers: This is kind of cheating because was on my list of 2017 novels I’m looking forward to a few weeks ago, too, but hey, it’s a debut I’m looking forward to.
The Beast Is an Animal: Peternelle van Arsdale‘s YA novel is a kind of fairy tale take (not yet another re-telling of Beauty and the Beast, though) and seems like the kind of thing I’d enjoy on a genre I’m not especially inclined towards.
Heather, The Totality: Like a lot of people, I totally loved Matthew Weiner’s series, Mad Men. He’s making his literary debut and the way he told stories on the show has me totally excited to read him in print.
The Hate U Give: There’s been a ton of hype around Angie Thomas’s book focused on the Black Lives Matter movement…it isn’t even out yet and the movie right have already been sold! I’m pumped to read it.
The Bear and the Nightingale: I remember reading the occasional Baba Yaga story as a kid and really loving them, so Katherine Arden’s novel based on Russian folklore definitely has me intrigued.
All Our Wrong Todays: Elan Mastai’s book posits a modern day world that’s everything that a mid-century American would have hoped for, flying cars and all. So when someone from that world finds themselves in ours, it seems like some kind of nightmare. This sounds fascinating!
American War: In a country that feels ever-more sharply divided, a civil war doesn’t seem completely beyond the realm of possibility, and it is just this possibility that Omar El Akkad explores. This focuses on a little girl being used as an instrument of war, which will get me right in the feels.
Chemistry: Stories about post-college discontentment tend to resonate with me, especially grad school oriented ones, so Weike Wang’s novel about a woman who suddenly realizes that her schoalrly pursuits might not be what she really wants is right up my alley.
Everything Belongs To Us: Modern day literature set in Asia and written by Asians is a big hole in my reading patterns, and this novel by Yoojin Grace Wuertz, about students in South Korea in the late 1970s, a time of social upheaval, seems like it will be fascinating.